The funeral planning requires so many logistics that it keeps me more or less distracted with family obligations, legal documents, and looking everywhere for clues as to why this happened. To be fair, it isn’t me who is making the actual arrangements. It’s Gordon, who walks in the door of my father and Jane’s home and instantly takes charge. He makes phone calls and evaluates caterer quotes and confirms the guest lists. He’s in control where I am not. With all the family and cousins and friends offering to help, I haven’t questioned for a minute that we are under-resourced. Because I have Gordon, and Gordon is on top of it. He’s thrown his whole self into helping me before, and he’s here again in a way I wish I never had to rely on.
March 30, 2016
MAX, CAITLIN, AND I arrive at the funeral home about an hour before the first visitation. Gordon and Alice and her boyfriend went ahead of us. I decided to leave Fiona with my mom today to limit Fiona’s exposure to dead bodies. Thankfully my friends Jackie and Sydnie will be here tomorrow to watch her so my mother can attend the funeral. Though it was my husband who planned it, I want to opt out of this funeral so badly you could have convinced me to be the one to stay home with Fiona. Funeral homes have a distinct rancid smell. A stale scent mixed with cleaning supplies. I can smell the forced air, the embalming cream, and the freshly vacuumed carpet. I hate funeral homes more than I hate throwing up. I can’t wait for this part to be over, but the future without my dad is unimaginable.
I cannot walk to the casket. I can’t look at the makeup on his remains. I know I’ll want to inspect his neck for bruises, evidence that he really hung himself. I can’t move to that end of the room. It was me who picked that casket. The one they will burn him in. A box we paid to light on fire. It doesn’t take long for me to become hysterical, literally screaming and howling wails. My aunt Lisa, his most beloved sister, lifts me to standing and guides me to the kitchen, out of the room where he lies. I cannot look at that body lying there. It isn’t him. She lets me bawl in her arms.
“I’m angry, too. I’m furious. We all are.” She strokes my hair. My eyes sting from crying.
“You know,” I say through sobs. “Last night, I had a dream that a scheduled email arrived, saying goodbye and explaining everything I meant to him. I want the email to tell me what happened.” I wish so intensely that he’d left me, and only me, a clue as to why this all had to end now, at a time when his genes were about to be reborn in another human being, who we just found out will be a son. The fact that there’s no letter is something I don’t know if I’ll ever recover from.
There is so much uncertainty in the finality of his death. This man has been so important to me, someone I never felt anger toward, even if it was warranted. I just loved him for how he sometimes tried, and sometimes failed, to be a supportive father, and how his love for me was always evident as I grew up. I was his first daughter. I wrote his eulogy last night in twenty minutes. It wasn’t difficult to recount my admiration for the man who helped me to define my career, my optimism, and my loyalty to friends and family.
“Thank you to everyone who came here today …”
April 2016
WEEKS PASS and I mourn. On my birthday, I’m sitting out in my backyard, reflecting on my father’s life, and I hear a familiar beep from my phone. It’s a text from Madeline.
Thinking of you.
If there was ever a reason for me to fall completely apart, isn’t this it?
I need Rose. I send over a text and ask when she’s available.
I arrive in the warm spring sun for my midwife appointment. Rose is back for this second baby and I’m more enamoured with her than ever. We survived a trauma together, and she will know if I’m falling apart again. Before my father’s death this pregnancy was uneventful. Perfectly uninteresting. Once we’re done with the regular check-up routine, she closes my chart and stands up, saying, “Well, you’re looking great. See you in a month?”
“Yes. But there’s one more thing we need to talk about.”
“Oh?” she says with mild concern.
“My father died. He killed himself.”
Rose gasps and her hand flies over her mouth, then she rolls her chair between my legs and gives me a strong, full hug.
“Maybe he wasn’t sure how to be a parent?” I continue. “Maybe that’s the reason I fell apart. I don’t know … I don’t know how I’m going to stop PPD from happening again.” I say this firmly without crying. I’m out of the energy to produce tears.
“I’m so sorry. This is so horrific. What can I do?”
Rose has seen me through horror before, and she’s the only one I would want there to birth this baby. Where I once thought she was aloof about me, I now sense her love.
“This is life,” I say. “Death and life. I cannot let this destroy me. Will you help me?”
“I’ll do my best,” she says. We stay together for another twenty minutes. I pack up my things, give her another hug, and head on my way. She jokes as I walk out the door, “Nothing is ever straightforward with you, is it Amanda?” She is smiling and full of love.
“That would be completely boring, wouldn’t it, Rose?” I say with a smirk.
July 2016
I’M AT OUR COMPANY BARBEQUE. I’m trying to hold my own with the twenty-somethings drinking beer in the park (frustrating for me as the one with no beer). I’m almost thirty weeks pregnant, still ten weeks to go. It’s time for the relay race, and it sounds like it involves spinning your head around a plastic golf club then running to grab a baton. Trinity Bellwoods is the quintessential Toronto hipster park — it has it all: big maple and oak trees that are perfect for lying under, huge patches of grass that friends lay blankets on and top with pizza and quiet beers and a joint or two. There is a kids’ playground, but it’s located in the west end of the park, away from all the smokers and drinkers. This park is a place where everyone is just happy to be outside.
Stubbornly, I yell “I’m in” when there’s a request for one more team member for a relay race. I stand in place, feeling the heat of the city surround me, and I spin five times around bent over, the centre of my forehead pressed firmly into the top of the golf club. The next thing I know, I’m on my back, surrounded by Madeline and a few other colleagues. I guess I blacked out? I’m feeling sick but more embarrassed.
When I get home, contractions start and they are intense. I close my eyes and try to sleep. The contractions aren’t noticeable when I wake up. Must have been Braxton Hicks.
A week later I’m at a routine check-up with Rose and I mention the fall. She turns bright white and wide eyed. “You did what? Why didn’t you call me?” She has judgment in her eyes.
“I figured you would tell me everything is fine. You always tell me everything is fine.”
Rose responds with anger. “You don’t know when I will and will not tell you it’s fine. This is a very serious situation. You could have gone into labour.”
I think she’s overreacting. To regain her approval, I downplay the consistent cramps that have followed me since the fall. She does a vaginal exam to make sure I haven’t been walking around dilated for a week. My water hasn’t broken. I’m really not worried about this.
I guess I should have been worried, because the next night the discomfort turns into non-stop, intense cramping and begins to take my breath away. I phone Rose to tell her I can’t take it anymore. She says, “Okay, listen, you’re going to pack a bag at meet me at the hospital on the labour and delivery ward. You might be in early labour.”
“I’m only thirty-one weeks pregnant,” I say in a panicked voice. “Will the baby make it if he’s born today?”
“We’ll worry about that when we get there. Just meet me at the hospital.”
I work from home every Friday, and this morning I’m alone in the house. Gordon is at work. Although my mother now watches Fiona four days a week, Fridays are typically her day to run errands and go to appointments. Thankfully she decided to come by this morning to take Fiona out to th
e park, to give me some quiet time to actually work. I phone her. “Hey, Mom. I think I might be in labour. Can you get back here and drive me to the hospital, like, now?” I text my next-door neighbour and ask her to watch Fiona. Bless her for being home.
I step outside to wait for my mother and daughter to return. My mom rounds the corner of our street and I can tell she’s been running. My neighbour walks over to collect Fiona, and when she hugs me I whisper, “It’s too soon, I can’t be having this baby right now.”
She pulls me close and says, “It’ll be okay, just go. Fiona will be fine here. We’ll play.” She grabs Fiona’s hand and walks her into their living room.
My mom is generally a pretty cautious driver, but her speed and precision driving to the hospital should win her some sort of medal. We’re en route to the hospital and at the door in less than fifteen minutes. Gordon shows up in a rideshare car and trips over his backpack strap while getting out of the car. He’s been racing.
“The dude took a stupid way to get here. I’m so sorry. Are we having a baby or what?”
Two hours of examinations and observation. I’m on my hands and knees in the labour and delivery triage area, Rose rubbing my back and explaining to the on-call doctor that I’m just over thirty weeks pregnant but had a fall last week.
“Look at this woman, she is clearly in labour. What can we do to slow this down? Steroids?” They’re talking about me but I can’t focus. All I can think about is that this baby might be showing up today and that he might be in danger.
I look at Rose, who walks back over to the bed and grabs my hand. It’s after dinnertime now and getting busier in the hospital. (“Babies are often born at night,” she’s told me many times.)
“Rose. Be honest with me,” I say. “Do you think I’m having this baby today?”
“Yes, I do. I would normally say no but looking at you right now, I think you’re in labour. It’s to be expected, what with all the stress in your life. This is your body pushing, really, truly pushing.”
I love her honesty and the relationship we’ve cultivated over these years. She is not lying to comfort me. She’s my truth teller and she senses what I need to hear. She can tell what’s going on in my body just by watching my movements. She can hear the baby stir from within me. Questions are swirling again: If my PPD was so bad before with no trigger, what am I in for now? Is this baby going to survive? Will I?
I turn onto my back and look directly at Rose.
“Are we going to be okay, Rose? Is the baby safe? He’s not supposed to come yet.”
Rose grabs my hand and squeezes harder than I’ve ever felt before. “You’re in the right place, Amanda. This is the right hospital; you’re surrounded by an entire team of people who know what to do.”
Flashback to the last time someone told me I was in the right place, doing the right thing. I’m less panicky this time, though. It doesn’t feel like I’m going to die today. I believe her when she says we’re going to get through this.
I’m given steroids to slow the contractions and admitted to the hospital. Gordon and I settle into a labour and delivery room and a nurse enters my room to strap a heartbeat and contraction monitor onto my belly. We’re here again. It can’t be time for him yet.
At midnight, the head of pediatrics comes into my room to tell me I should be prepared to have this baby tonight.
“If it happens, the baby will be kept in the NICU. We can deliver babies at thirty weeks, we do it often enough. It’s not anyone’s preference, but if we have to, we will.” His tone is measured, serious, and kind. I notice he’s only looking at me, as if to speak directly to the baby. “We don’t want this little one out here just yet. So let’s continue to watch these contractions and hope the drugs do their job. That way, you can go home and let the baby cook a little longer. How does that sound?” Humour at midnight on the labour and delivery ward. I don’t know if it’s a gift or a punishment.
He continues, “We need some additional details about your last birth. Any complications?”
Gordon laughs so loud it startles the doctor.
“Well, yes,” I say with a smile. “First of all, my daughter was born breech ... vaginally.”
“You did a vaginal breech in this hospital? High five!” The doctor leans over my bed to slap both my hands in a loud and thunderous clap.
“I was also admitted to the psychiatric ward, got a bad, unexplained fever, and was an in-patient for eighteen days. They put me on medication, which I’m still on today.”
“I see.” His tone grows serious as he pens more notes into his clipboard. I can hear his pen squeak.
There are details about the risk to the baby and chances of survival. I take a deep breath. This room is rather orange, kind of like when the streetlights shine into your car when you’re on a highway at night. The city lights are shining through the hospital window, the way they did in the psych ward. It feels dangerous to be here. This doesn’t feel like the night I’m supposed to have my son. But I also know that if I panic about the change of plans I will definitely end up psychotic. I take a moment to be happy that my psychiatrist put me back on a strong dose of anti-depressants after my father died.
Three days of hospital observation drag slowly, but it seems like the doctors have been successful in keeping the baby inside me and preventing my water from breaking — the key symptom that would change this scenario from risky to most definitely labour.
As we pack up to head home, where I will wait out the rest of this pregnancy, a nurse makes sure to remind me to “stay on bedrest, the most you can.” It’s the most outrageous recommendation you can deliver to a senior marketer at a tech start-up and the mother of a two-year-old. Bedrest? In what world do I have a chance to rest at all, let alone stay in bed for six weeks? As I understand it, if the baby is not in medical danger, bedrest is not mandatory. I feel awful for anyone’s bedridden sentence; it must be complete torture. I agree to house arrest but not bed, and later suggest to Gordon that my working from home full-time will help me avoid any strain from commuting. I’m not staying in bed for weeks. I’ll conduct meetings and new staff onboarding from my dining room table, apologizing for the heat because our tiny new window air conditioning unit sucks. I am going to make this work. I’ve been through hell before and survived, and I will survive again.
August 23, 2016
SIX WEEKS of on and off contractions, some worse than others. They are extra strong today. There were days when I felt like it could be the time, but looking back, I see it was just intrusive cramping. Nothing like today. This is different. I interrupt a call with my senior sales manager, Shar, because I’m struggling to focus on the intricacies of an Excel spreadsheet report we’re discussing — I am most definitely beginning labour.
“I’m so sorry, Shar, but I’ve got to call you back, I’m struggling to focus on this report. I’m going to lie down and I’ll give you a call later, okay?” Shar sounds annoyed but there’s little I can do about it now. I start doing squats in my kitchen to relieve the pain, and decide it’s time to phone Rose.
“Get over here. Right now. Stop what you’re doing and hurry to my clinic. Bring your mom and Fiona if you have to.” Rose’s sense of urgency has always spurred immediate action, from the morning she said to get over to the hospital to try to deliver Fiona vaginally, to the time she suggested I seek professional medical help for PPD. If she says go, it’s time to go.
She has a way of communicating a lot without using a ton of emotion. I don’t have time to figure out child care, and my mom figures it’s not safe for me to drive in this state, so Fiona and I pile into my mom’s car and head over to the midwives’ clinic together. Rose examines me in front of Fiona and my mom, then says, “It looks like you’re now three centimetres dilated, maybe four? It could be less, but something is happening.”
The baby is coming today. Rose is a busy woman; she explains that she needs to head off to another woman who’s in labour.
“Go home for a
few hours,” she says. “You have some time. It’s happening, but not this minute.”
I call Gordon on the way back from the clinic. “You better pack up your things. This is labour.” It’s a different conversation than the time I tried to downplay my symptoms with our first birth. I know this baby is coming today — it’s only a matter of when.
I get home and decide to take a nap. Before I do, I take a shower to ease the cramps, then open my bedroom window to let in the summer breeze. I wind myself around the body pillow that’s been monopolizing the centre of our bed for these weeks of house arrest and close my eyes once again. I wake up a few hours later to my baby kicking my ribs. Wake up, Mama, it’s go time.
When he gets home, Gordon packs Fiona an overnight backpack and we linger by the front door in a strong family hug before sending her off to my mom’s for a sleepover. It’s time to focus on labour, and I trust that my mom will keep Fiona safe, just the two of them watching TV and eating ice cream, while I deliver her new baby brother.
Day Nine Page 21